How Does My Doctor Decide Which Blood Pressure Pills To Prescribe?

November 19, 2008

Scott Wright, M.D., Cardiologist, Mayo Clinic

Question: How does my doctor decide which of the many different blood pressure pills to prescribe?

Answer:
I mean, how does the doctor pick a medicine. Sometimes it's simply random choice. If you look at a patient and you attempt to understand which drug will work best in that patient, it is a numbers game. Some drugs work better than others but there's no one drug that's a sure fired medication for any patient. So I think the wisdom of the physician is to look carefully at what may be the best drug not knowing that it would be absolutely the right drug and appreciating that increasingly treating blood pressure -- elevated blood pressure that is -- means two medications. So when you partner two drugs together the odds go up dramatically for the combination of medications to reduce blood pressure effectively. So I think the shift nationally towards two or three drug therapy is really the basis for how a doctor even sometimes selects medication right now.

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